Split-Brain Patients | ScienceGate

This chapter defends the 2-agents claim, according to which the two hemispheres of a split-brain subject are associated with distinct intentional agents. The empirical basis of this claim is that, while both hemispheres are the source or site of intentions, the capacity to integrate them in practical reasoning no longer operates interhemispherically after split-brain surgery. As a result, the right hemisphere-associated agent, R, and the left hemisphere-associated agent, L, enjoy intentional autonomy from each other. Although the positive case for the 2-agents claim is grounded mainly in experimental findings, the claim is not contradicted by what we know of split-brain subjects’ ordinary behavior, that is, the way they act outside of experimental conditions.

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Duality Myths

10.1093/oso/9780198809654.003.0009 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth Schechter

Keyword(s):

Narrative Art ◽

Split Brain ◽

Dramatic Form ◽

Natural Way

This chapter addresses the intuitive fascination of the split-brain phenomenon. According to what I call the standard explanation, it is because we ordinarily assume that people are psychologically unified, while split-brain subjects are not psychologically unified, which suggests that we might not be unified either. I offer a different interpretation. One natural way of grappling with people’s failures to conform to various assumptions we make about them is to conceptualize them as having multiple minds. Such multiple-minds models take their most dramatic form in narrative art as duality myths. The split-brain cases grip people in part because the subjects strike them as living embodiments of such myths.

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Bodies and Being One

10.1093/oso/9780198809654.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth Schechter

Keyword(s):

Self Awareness ◽

Single Object ◽

Split Brain ◽

The Relationship

This chapter concerns the relationship between the split-brain case and the non-split case. In the first half of the chapter, I consider arguments to the effect that if split-brain subjects have two minds apiece, then so do non-split subjects. Sometimes these arguments have taken the form of a reductio against the 2-thinkers claim for split-brain subjects. These arguments do not work: that a split-brain subject has two minds does not mean that I have two minds, although it does mean that I could. The second half of the chapter offers my own proposal for the respect in which R’s and L’s co-embodiment as one animal, S, makes a split-brain subject one of us: I argue that S must be the single object of both R’s and L’s implicit bodily self-awareness.

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